Gravity

Chapter 4

Draco woke up one morning and felt it again, that strange burning inside his heart, and he knew, before the sunlight struck his face, that he would jump that day. He got out of bed, quickly threw on some clothes and, without even pausing for a quick bite of breakfast, grabbed his broom and went directly to the edge of the cliff.

He stood there for a while, watching the waves crash against the rocks. He thought about Hermione. She had not returned to poke through his books, as she had said she would, nor once since then. All she gave by way of explanation was a brief note sent by owl that Monday morning stating she was busy and would not be coming over. She had not rescheduled.

On the one occasion he had seen her, at a birthday party for one of the Weasleys, she put distance between them in everything she did. When they were alone in the kitchen for a few brief moments, things between them did not feel the same. There was a strange, electrical tension in the air that he sensed she felt as well. As soon as she could, Hermione left the room.

It both annoyed and relieved Draco.

He was annoyed because she was behaving as if absolutely nothing had happened. They had had a few weeks where they were more than just two people who were friends with Harry Potter, but it seemed that was to be all. Just a few weeks. Exactly what they had been didn't even have a name. He wondered if you could be considered simply an acquaintance with someone you had known almost ten years, someone who had held your hand when your mother died, who had fought by your side and fended off Death Eaters with you, and who had spent time in your house, going through your things and sharing conversation. He doubted it, but they had not progressed to real friendship, leaving them somewhere in between. Their brief relationship, or whatever it had been, remained unnamable.

The fact still remained that it was gone, and it was not his fault. He couldn't think of anything at all that he had done wrong no matter how hard he tried. She behaved exactly the same toward him as she had during the War: friendly but distant, making it clear in silent but obvious ways that she did not want him to be a part of her life.

At the birthday party she had laughed and carried on around him, but never with him, not in that easy, casual way you have with friends. If it even looked like they might be nearing that level of intimacy, she was sure to clam up and within minutes she was out of the room, leaving him silently seething.

Draco kicked a rock and watched it sail out over the edge of the cliff and drop towards the water far below.

He stared down at the rocks below as the sun slowly made its way higher in the sky. He took a deep breath, then another, then another. The world seemed to still around him again. He closed his eyes for a brief second and his mother's face flashed in his memory. When he opened his eyes, he waited one second and then jumped, broom in hand.

Draco counted two full seconds before pulling his broom underneath him. Two full seconds of free fall, of increasing speed, plummeting toward the sharp rocks below. He had fallen for two full seconds. The force of gravity continued pulling him down for a fraction of a second even after he had straddled the broom. He frowned, knowing he would have to examine his fall in more detail and adjust his calculations. Of course he would not stop falling as soon as the broom was beneath him, which he should have anticipated. Timing was crucial to his plan; he couldn't afford to be off even by a fraction of a second.

He repeated the jump a few times, and then stayed on his broom to think about this unexpected twist. The idea of jumping off the cliff was scary enough already, knowing that if he messed up even slightly, he could wind up sliced into pieces, food for the sharks. He would have to work out exactly how long it took the broom to catch him, and whether that time changed depending on how far he fell before he called it.